During these last couple of weeks I have been mostly been sitting in front of a computer screen working on the website for The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia. The project has been structured into 4 different parts with text and galleries. The next step is to work on the material for a book.
Apart from some large format photography I have mostly been photographing whilst on the morning and afternoon poodlewalks: this photograph of leaves and bark on the side of the road is an example:
There is a drabness to this photo as the roadside leaves and bark have been covered by dust from cars travelling along an unsealed road in late summer. The colours are dulled as a result. It’s a dusty, dry world in late summer. We await the rains.
I am struggling with where I am going with the photography on the poodlewalks. Clouds are another subject that is being explored:
Or more accurately it is clouds and light. Photography, after all, is often seen as being about light and shadow: a form of light-writing or writing with light; a material practice of managing light with its associated cultural function of light as the sign or symbol of knowledge and truth.
Light is a significant consideration for Australian photographers. When he was in Leigh Creek Stan around 1959-60 Ostoja-Kotkowski discovered how extraordinary the light of the Australian desert is; how intense it is and what it does to your perception—it really dazzles—and so he began his project to “paint” with light. This was prior to digital computing was ever used to produce luminous colours in something called ‘computer art’, and later ‘digital imaging’ or ‘graphic design’ which emerged in the 1990s. Photography is either the transcription of light onto a light sensitive material surface, or photography as the translation of light into digital data.